Chapter III: Part 3

"Erna." he whispered in the caressing way his brown lips had of saying her name, "Erna." As if the word were a puff of down. "Dearest. Please?" It was very quiet in the hall and her closed door like a tongue out at him.

Something like an ache for Musliner smote Bertha. He was so kind. Often in the fruit hampers was a bag of sweets tucked away for the servants and on Bertha's every other Thursday out, a dollar bill was left lying for her on the kitchen table. He was sensitive, too, in a way that hurt Bertha dimly. Once when she had inadvertently stumbled upon him, seated alone in the dining room with his head in his hands, he had jumped up redly, giving her a random order with a brusqueness not his....

He would have jumped redly, too, had he seen Bertha seeing him as he knocked and tried the door softly.

"Erna--dear. You asleep? It's Ben. Please. Dear? I want to come in."

Finally he went back to his room, closing the door.

Bertha somehow, knew.

Doors. The long corridors of her silence were all nicked up with the sounds of them, closing.

One day, when May like a shy pink parasol was beginning to open wide and wider over the city, a lovely thing happened to Bertha.

The Musliners gave a picnic. Thirty guests climbed gleefully into a moving van especially upholstered in gay cretonnes for the occasion and rode fifteen miles up the Hudson to a grove, recently acquired by Mr. Musliner as an anniversary gift to his wife.

There were hampers of food and freezers of cream and cases of drinks and dozens of lemons and all the flimsy paper napkin and wooden plate paraphernalia dear to picnickers. Hundreds of sandwiches. Pails of salad. Cakes of every turn known to Bertha's hand. For two days Bertha and Julie the waitress and Lulu the housemaid buttered and sliced and wrapped in oiled paper and packed.

A set of white enameled picnic dishes arrived which Mrs. Musliner rejected as "spoiling the fun." Apples were dipped into syrup and impaled upon sticks. Boxes of marshmallows for toasting. Potatoes for roasting. Hammocks were packed into the van and an old upholstered couch upon which Mrs. Musliner reclined, once they had reached the open road, her guests in mock homage about her.

Bertha and Julie rode in front with the driver. How they chattered! Julie was a dark, nervous girl. Rather pretty in her waitress uniform, but sagged and run-down-looking in street clothes. She had been married once and upon the slightest provocation would display a scar across her neck to indicate where a jealous husband had attempted to cut her throat. When the driver saw it he tried to kiss her there and she lurched against Bertha and Bertha lurched against the side of the van and the open road rang with laughter. Julie's. The driver's. And the rising merriment of the group behind. Bertha's laughter, too.

The day was so soft. Warmth ran up her legs. The driver reached around Julie's shoulder to pinch her and she reached across Julie's lap to slap him--plump in the stomach, so that he simulated pain, while really he was doubled up with guffawing.

From inside the van someone spied an organ grinder toiling up the road.

"An organ grinder! Come on in. Hey--you--stop. Come on in. Mucha mon! Comma to picnic. Mucha mon. See. Play for the queen on the dais. Come up--in."

And so the lifted, bewildered Italian dragged merrily into the van and the horse flecked onward with a whip that flashed into an S.

The river ran ahead to show them the road. Bertha had never seen a river. This one was quick and gay and on its way somewhere. Not full of lips like the harbor.

On its way to the grove. On its way to the grove.

"Looka," cried Julie, "all them rusty tin cans down by the water. Some tin can sports musta passed this way."

"Oh. Oh. Oh." Julie holding both her sides with laughter and the driver letting his lines slide to lean over and hold them for her, too.

"Look at that Bo over there in the field," he cried, cracking the S with his whip, "that ain't a nose on him--somebody fired a ripe tomater and it stuck."

"Oh la, la! Ripe tomater. Ain't he bloody? A ripe tomater. Go tell that to your rich uncle if his laughs don't come easy."

"Well, Square-head, it's your looka now. Looka now. Looka there. Looka quick, and tell us what you see--"

"He says, 'Looka quick, Bertha.' Come outta your trance and look! Whadda you see? Look about you. Looka here. Looka there."

"Looka, looka," cried Bertha half daft with the lush smell of grass and of warmth, "looka those clouds--white--white clouds--little children up there--see--falling outta bed--"

"Oh Lord, that's a good one! Giddy ap, you gol-darn plugs you--little children falling outta bed.

Oh lud, it's great to be crazy,
It's great to be crazy,
Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great to be nuts.

And then Julie taking up the refrain.

"Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great, to be nuts.

***

The Grove ran out in a point to the river and would not let it pass, so the water went around it with a soft hiss. One tree grew almost horizontal and laughed down at it.

Little Mrs. Musliner, with her blouse open at the throat and whortleberry leaves in her hair, jumped astride it and beat it as if it had been a horse.

"Giddy-app--my trusty steed--swim me across the Hellespont!"

Bertha, tilting the salt water out of the ice cream freezer, stood almost waiting for the plunge and the sound of foam and the arrowhead line of the water parting before the tree stump whose leaves were a flowing mane.

A Young Fellow who dined frequently at the house snatched up a fruit knife from one of the hampers, clamped the blade between his teeth, and flew on the tree trunk behind her, balancing her against the shock with his hands on her light young hips, and the guests stood back and cheered.

"If I was little Musliner, I'd wipe up the floor with that young customer," said Julie, who was squeezing lemons.

"What?" said Bertha.

"Aw--you--hunky--you don't know you're on earth unless somebody stages an earthquake under you."

Suddenly Musliner came running down the turf, straddling the tree trunk, too, his little legs waving and too short even to dangle loosely.

"We're off," he shouted and dug with his knees into the spongy bark.

"Three's a crowd," sang somebody. "Who has the grace to stay home from the Hellespont?"

"Why I have," cried the Young Fellow, bounding off, and the red scorching through his fine tan.

"Now," cried Mr. Musliner, wriggling forward with his short fat knees, his hands coming down on the curve of his wife's slim young hips--"Now--we're off--alone!"

But suddenly Mrs. Musliner was tired. She climbed down jerking back from his touch. The wind and the May had gone out of her face.

"Come on," she said, "let us eat."

***

The meal was already spread on long wooden planks set up on wooden braces, but someone found a natural table of dog violets set out beside a little orchestra of waterfall and with great ado and much merriment the feast was moved up the hillside.

Under her breath Julie bitterly demurred. The climb was rocky and the running back and forth, from the hampers in the van to the remote spot on the knoll, twisted her ankles and strained her back and once, scaling the top, she fell and barked her shin and passed sandwiches over gay shoulders with her eyelids stung with the heat of the held-back tears.

But Bertha! With one heft of her arm she carried a case of wine, running with it lightly over the knoll. The dance up and the dance down. Ice cream freezers to be rolled up hill. She shoved aside the assistance of the driver and spun them in an ecstasy along the dark, damp flesh of earth. Rocks bit in through her shoes and she wanted to kick them off, so that her freed toes might bite them back. Rivers of strength seemed pressing at the dam of her body. She wanted the knoll to be a mountain that she might stagger, slip, and sweat up its flank, and the hampers to be kegs with the weight to bend her double.

The old Slav song of the women far behind her, who had worn the runic brooch, was so close to her consciousness that she wanted to sing it as she mounted the hill. The muted old concertina in her carpetbag, from dear knows what ancestral squatter in a peasant hut---she could have played it then; squeezed some of the locked-up ecstasies through it. She wanted to run. Feet were not mute--they tasted the sap of earth and bounded back vibrant with it as if they had drunk wine. The hillside. It cut her. It skinned her shoes and on the inside her toes curled, pushed against her stockings, and wanted out.

The wine ran in little pools. The Young Fellow, with his fingers for Pan's pipes, did an oafish dance around the table that was spread with wood violets. Someone tossed a great platter of the sandwiches high up and let them rain down again, splattering and scattering. Mrs. Musliner sucked at a candied apple and shot out her little red bib of a tongue at everybody, but longest and reddest to the Young Fellow, who touched the top of it with his forefinger and then pressed that forefinger behind his ear.

The sun, hot and high and prodigal, made great stains of light and shade. After a while groups and pairs began to shy off. One dark youth in eyeglasses stretched himself solemnly down the length of the table of dog violets, an empty wine bottle very tight in his clutch, and almost immediately fell asleep. Mrs. Musliner, side-stepping him gingerly, stuck a lilac spray upright between his teeth, so that it waved there to the tipsy wind of his breath. Then she and the Young Fellow squealing delight at this danced off down a footpath that turned suddenly and wiggled teasingly through some underbrush.

Even Julie and the driver had gone off and the organ-grinder lay asleep in a tree hollow with his body all up in a coil.

It was pleasant tiptoeing over the violets and wadding all the paper napkins up in a ball, and poking them out of sight in a hamper and stacking the wooden plates and scattering the crumbs and running up and down the knoll and clearing the forest back into its woodland quiet, so that the tinkle of the waterfall came through again and, except for those caught under the sleeping figure with the lilac spray waving in his breath, all the little violets lifted themselves up again as if after a storm.

Once, rolling an empty freezer down a steeper side of the knoll, she came upon Musliner, seated at the head of the trail that wiggled so naughtily off through some underbrush, and chewing a blade of grass.

"Well, Bertha, we seem to be the sole survivers of the party."

"Oh, Mr. Musliner, it's grand."

"Grand." A word as lonesome as a mountain and she wanted to tell him warmly about the lovely, green-lace grove of his and of the Slav song that ran along her throat wanting out, just as her feet running over the warm earth in their bluchers wanted out. "Grand." She could have bitten her tongue for some of its blood to flow into and warm what she wanted to say, but all that she had was "grand" and so she stood saying it and smiling at him with the lips which she hated because they were mutes.

"You're a good girl, Bertha," he said, looking at her with eyes that were hurt as if they had spikes through them, "you don't run off and shirk the job like Julie. Here."

He handed her a silver dollar. She took it and should have gone on trundling her ice cream freezer down the hillside toward the van, but somehow she didn't. She stood there, looking and wetting at her lips.

"Well?" he said. He was half seated on a tree stump, one leg dangling, and chewing and chewing the blade of grass along his front teeth.

Her gaze kept darting from him to down the little snake of trail and her throat kept tightening. She knew. He had worked very hard over this day. Her day. It lay now in a ruin around him, as he sat there chewing the grass blade his brown lips twisted as if it were bitter. In the tree hollow the organ grinder slept in his tight little coil. Bertha trundling the ice cream freezer down the hill. Otherwise no one left back. Not even Julie and the driver. Little bells of laughter through the trees. Bertha somehow didn't matter. For the life of him he could not keep his eyes, as if they were wounded in his head, from rolling a little toward that trail.

"I'll bring you a candied apple," she said.

She wanted him to be surly. It would have been easier then, for her not to be sorry, but he smiled and nodded no, and all she could think of to say through the ache in her throat was:

"There is an ice cream rooster left over and some Burgundy. You would like a nice cool glass of Burgundy?"

"No, Bertha," he said, "thank you, now you run along and clear up and don't you bother about me." But his eyes were traveling down the trail with hers, and finally he rose and came over to her, looking up at her from his squatness and with the brownish whites to his eyes very prominent.

"She's very young, Bertha," he said. "We must help her."

"I--want to--"

"Help her, Bertha. Never let her do anything that will make her unhappy. She is too young to see clearly ahead--you are a home-body--watch over her, Bertha--mother her."

Mother, That was a word that could twist her and make her want to bite at the cove of her arm, and yet, standing there on the hillside, hurting with this man's pain, it was as if something within her were spreading to cover a huddler. Actually, Bertha was two months younger than Mrs. Musliner, but so strangely older in the locked-up lore of the dim procession that peopled her silences!

Back in that procession, a young fledgling who walked in beauty and whose Sonatas had not yet been born, but whose melodies were to wind down through the centuries, had pursued a girl with flax-colored braids like Bertha's, across a plushy field in south of Hungary, capturing her finally and kissing her. At first she beat him off and then, because his lips were rich and his young head defiant, like a child's, it was she who held him. Broodily and close to her heart in the harvest moonlight ... at dawn he was still singing softly to a great-great-grandmother of Bertha, troubled wisps of melodies that were not quite born to him yet--precious, groping old songs that were locked now in the heart of Bertha. Old Bertha, who was two months younger than Mrs. Musliner.

***

The sunlight bowed back out of the grove and the couples and groups came back tiredly and happily and hungrily out of the dusk. The driver built a bonfire and the Young Fellow unpacked the marshmallows and Bertha, with the water singing over her hands, washed the potatoes for roasting at the spring, and a full moon as dainty as an apricot came up between two trees.

Firelight on faces. Eager mouths with the teeth showing, hovering over just the right brownness of marshmallow. Low laughter. The grove crowding up around the circle of light. Mrs. Musliner, with her face in her palms and the reflected firelight leaping and falling in her eyes which had crybaby rims around them. The smell of darkness and the bleed of sap. Leaves, curling and burning to death with gestures of human pain. Over by the spring it was so dark that it seemed to Bertha that the evening was some great black cow standing there beside her panting softly, so that she could feel its sides breathe. Sweet-smelling darkness with a give to it like a cow's flank. The earth beside the spring was all wet with clear water and leaning over to rinse potatoes, she could feel the little sucks, greedily at her feet.

Warm, pulling, sucking earth that had teased her all day and over which her feet wanted to leap, free!

And then Bertha sat down, slyly, on a moss-tinged jut of rock, and picked up her skirts, and down came her great balbriggan stockings, wide-ribbed and the color of clay, and out sprang her legs. White urns in the gloom. The rip open of buttons. Little yawns of her empty shoes standing there on a dirt ledge. Squnch, into the slow pour of the good black mud that closed up around her ankles like a strong and hungry mouth.

Squnch. Squnch. Squirm of the pouring soil up between her churning, spatulate toes. She could feel it with the very pit of her. Warm. Black. Close. Her mysterious friend, the soil, whispering to her with those tight eager lips--it was difficult not to throw out her arms and shout--tear open her bulk of blouse where it cluttered her breast and shout--the curling, winding, whispering, kissing soil hugging her with its eager lips--she wanted to run--to run back barefoot along the plushy fields.

The organ grinder, dazed with good food and drink, began suddenly to grind out, in rapid spill from his hurdy gurdy, a folk song out of Ukrainia.

High cheek bones and velvet bodices that laced up in front. Red cotton skirts that twirled. Men in high boots and tight red sashes and fine mustachios that scratched! Sweat in hovels. Long low rafters, candlelight-scarred. Quivering hips. Waving mugs. Low of bulls and slow, hot smell of steaming dung heaps. Sweat and love and courage of solitary childbirth on wide moors. Strength of splayed Slav lips! Yeow, the ring of rafters! Yeow, the splayed Slav lips! Bertha with her arms outspread and a yeow that landed her squat on her heels out on a spot of turf that was stained with the firelight!

"Hurra! Look! Who is this? The cook! That's the girl. Give us a dance. Native heath, by Jove. Look at your Swede, Muzz, spinning a goulash fandangle. Bravo, go to it--Yuiop-- I say!"

***

Spinning tarantellas with broad white toe for pivot. Swaying hip rhythm, eyes slits, like wise smiling old buttonholes. Hands broad on haunches and little bulge of bacchanalian belly--Yeow--squat heels deep in turf, arms flung wade and half wrenched from sockets! Leg out from under. Yeow--up again on toe pivot--spin--spin--laughter over wild moors--sweat in hovels--hot male hands on square-hipped girls--scratch of mustachios against laughing, square-teethed women--crones with the soil ground into their wrinkles. Sing, peasant, sing, and swing the grinning scythe! Sing of the strong fertilizing soil and the dung heaps that steam and the crones that are wise with old lore and the women who love, and who bear, and who weep, and the wide-legged men with the necks like tree boles. Sing--Yeow--of meat and of soil and of strength and of love--sing Yeow! Yeow! Yeow!

The hurdy-gurdy suddenly silent--Bertha with her arms flung wide and half wrenched from their sockets. Toes in the soil. Hair down. Her bosom where the waist had fallen open gleaming and high.

***

Going home through the languid night it was Bertha who sat next to the driver, his knee slyly digging up against hers which she flung angrily back.

"Big girl. Good girl." He kept saying over and over again under his breath without moving his lips.

She felt the tail of his glance slide over her bosom where the waist had fallen open and she clutched it closed and kept edging toward Julie, who was sullen.

"Before I'd dance for pennies, like a dago's monkey. What's the idea, giving a free show without an invite? I know my place, I do. They'd have showed you yours, if they wasn't all boozy as boiled owls. Listen to them now. I'm a self-respecting girl. I know my place. I don't dance for pennies. That dance was a give-away. You musta been born in a cow house where they dance all night and then grab up their pails and start to milking. That's old country dancing. I'm American. I know my place."

"What did I--do--Julie?"

"What did you do? Say, was it as bad as that? You musta had some inside information on the Burgundy. Made a holy show of yourself, that's what you did."

All the way home, edging away from the driver's horrid knee, the question kept spinning inside her brain, "What did I do? What? What?"

She felt so empty. As if all the strength had run out through her fingers and toes. A flask that had been drained of wine, that for years and years had been beating against its sides.

***

One evening in a winter that roared with blizzard, and snowstorms like plunging white buffaloes leaped before city traffic, there were dinner covers for eight at the Musliners, but no guests. Automobile wheels ground futilely in the hub-high ruts. Surface cars, shaggy with storm, stalled in their tracks. The streets slept standing, like horses.

In spite of Bertha skimming each new grease film off of the foods, dinner began to cloy, the entrée of creamed mushrooms darkening, the patty cases sagging as they waited.

With fever spots in her cheeks, Mrs. Musliner, in a bower of the tulle that her dress formed around her, kept rattling at the telephone, her urgent forefinger frantically up and down at it, but the wires were under the storm and only snow-hush came through.

"Central--you must answer--it's urgent--you must--hello--"

In his dinner clothes and very brown above the white of his shirt front, Mr. Musliner chided her in a little good-humored way he had.

"Well, little Snow White, it looks for once as if you must have dinner all alone with your old hubby."

Her smile up at him could be like a crucifixion--as if a tourniquet twisting in the very ganglia of her were forcing her lips to part.

"Central," she implored, working the hook up and down, "please--won't you answer?"

Through the little glass pane in the pantry door, Bertha could see him, bumbling about the rose tulle of her in the slow hitting fashion of a brown bee, his hand, wanting to touch her but constantly withdrawing, did pause at her throat where it flowed palely down into her bodice. It stiffened at his approach and a rib of vein came out.

Julie, peeping too, sniggered. He had a curiously sensitive blush. It came up, redly, as if he had heard.

"Central--can't you hear--you must answer."

He walked over to the buffet and shot out a swallow of seltzer.

"Afraid it looks like a quiet evening--alone, Little One," he said, with his words etched on his laugh like a design against thin glass.

She hung up the receiver, with the one vein still out on her pretty throat, and drew up her chair beside the lace, the flower- and the candle-spread table.

"Of course, Ben, it's just disappointing, that's all. Horrid old storm." She made a little _moue_ and he looked at her adoring it, and then started for the vacant place beside her.

"Oh," she said and leaped backward--"I--they may come yet."

"How stupid--of course--they may--come yet," he said and took his accustomed place, remotely opposite, but his eyes, with their liver-spotted whites, eager for her through the little jungle of fern and pink roses of the center piece.

In the kitchen Bertha began to ladle out the bouillon. It made a clear little pouring noise. Like a thin cry.

***

A square of light from a window across the areaway could work its way into Bertha's room in a luminous plaster. Long after the electric bulb, dangling by a wire over her cot, was snapped out she liked to lie regarding the reflected glow.

A patch of warmth against solitude. A cave with a lit mouth. It was pleasant to walk through it and down into the aisles of doze....

That night, the glow sprang sharply across the snow-packed areaway and long after she had crawled into her cot, she lay at this fantastic entrance into her sleep, dallying.

Little wisps of smoke rose off the embers of the day. Half consciousnesses. Six of the eight medallions of the salmon _mousse_ were left over. That ridge of fear in a vein out across Mrs. Musliner's throat. The Farleys would have relished the salmon _mousse_ creamed the next day. Not the Musliners. Sufficient unto the day the salmon thereof. The grapes he had brought her were wadded in cotton and in the upper section of the refrigerator. Would the salmon _mousse_ taint them of fishiness? Snow. A wide, wide wilderness of it with humpbacks walking hidden under it and pushing it up into mountains. Drip. Hollow, pleasant rhythm, through the doze that made it difficult to awaken. Drip. Drip. Drip. That must be the ice pan flooding. It was so hard to awaken. Drip. Drip. Drip. Doors. The brown door that was Musliner and it led inward to a dwelling place of light. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then in a crash through the light fabric of this doze, a pink little cyclone.

It was hard for Bertha to cross the hair line from her dim sleep to her dim reality.

"Who is it?" she cried. "What?" And sat up in the gilt darkness, two enormous braids of her tan hair hitting against the wall like rope.

It was Mrs. Musliner, in a nightgown made pinker by the flicker of her body through it, shuddering there on the floor behind the refuge of the door she had slammed and locked.

"Mrs. Musliner!"

"Bertha, hide me. Keep me here with you. Alone. Bertha, let me stay here with you."

She was trembling so that her nightgown went rippling along her limbs and her teeth and her lips were fanned dry with moans. And Bertha, Norse in her hulk, and in the great flannel undersuit and petticoat, stooping over the torn little huddle there on the floor.

"Mrs. Musliner--little baby--what is it?'

"Keep me, Bertha. Hold me tight. You will keep me, won't you, Bertha?"

"Baby. Little mine. You'll catch cold. You have bad dreams. This is no place for you."

"Let me stay. You're so quiet, Bertha. Let me stay here with you. It calms me. What are you hearing all the time while you work? What do you know? Bertha, tell me--what makes you so still--what do you know that I don't know--help me to know it too--help me be quiet like you--that dance--I remember--you know things that are beautiful and terrible--and yet you are quiet--help me, Bertha--I know so little--only that I am a bad, bad girl--and afraid--Bertha--afraid--"

"You poor little one--you bane walking in your sleep?"

"No. No. I'm not asleep. I'm not dreaming. I'm afraid, Bertha--keep me here with you. Hold me--don't let go--don't let him--get me--Bertha--"

She was like a child in a storm flung there against the rock of Bertha, crying there and clinging there and shuddering there.

"You little thing--you yoost shivering--you bane sick--I go and call Mr. Mus--"

She was a flash then, out of Bertha's arms, halfway across the room, her gown a quick ripple of silk about her body, and her arms out toward the window with a gesture of destination.

"Don't open that door! If you call him, I'll jump. I can't stand it if you open that door. I'll jump out!"

"Mrs. Musliner. Baby. Wait! I won't open it. You bane sick. I keep care of you. So. So. Here, in my bed--yoost shivering--yoost shivering--"

She carried her bodily, a curving petal, toward the cot.

"Don't let him get me, Bertha."

"Poor little baby. Here please, if you don't mind--on my cot--you bane chilled."

It was still warm there from the sag of Bertha's body. A nest of coarse bedding that grated through Mrs. Musliner's film of gown.

"Let me go get you soft blankets. Mine bane stiff like a board."

"No. No. Don't leave me, Bertha. I like it hard. I want it stiff--like a board. Like a cross. Like you. To hurt with the hardness and not have it matter. Don't leave me, Bertha, stay with me close. You understand, Bertha. He mustn't come near--I couldn't stand it. He's so brown. A brown dog scratching at my door. Scratching. Scratching--night after night--all these months. I can't endure it. To-night--I--it seemed to me--he had a key! I thought I heard him fumbling out there with one but--he wouldn't do that--would he, Bertha--he wouldn't do that?"

"No. No."

"But he kept turning the knob--and scratching--that terrible scratching--and then--something--that sound in the lock--like a key--hold me, Bertha."

"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--don't be afraid--"

"I am, Bertha. I am. You understand. He mustn't come--I can't stand it. Ever since we're married--I have managed so--never to be alone--never to be alone. I shouldn't ever have done it. They forced me. My father--family--money--he's so brown, Bertha--so terribly brown--brown lips--so good and so brown and so terrible. Help me, Bertha. You understand. You somehow--you--you cook--you understand."

Bertha did. Dumbly. Mutely. And in a way that wound like a cry around her heart.

"Poor Mrs. Musliner," she wanted to say, frightened by the wetted lips and inexorable eyes of the cyclorama, even when they only shone at her through the little pink jungle. Hers not to reason why. Nature's big impervious scheme for her had no concern with the shrinking of her flesh beyond that she must beget flesh.

"He bane good man."

"I know it, Bertha--that's what makes it so hard. Bertha--I want to go away--there's someone--Bertha, come closer--there's someone--"

"The Young Fellow," said Bertha, and looked at her and made deeper the cradle of her arms about her--"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--yoost open the brown door."

"I can't, Bertha. I've tried and I can't."

"Yoost lay and get quiet."

"You're so deep and still, Bertha. Like snow. I never noticed--before----"

"Shh-h-h, you little one. Don't shiver so. Let me go, yoost over there to the cupboard to get you my coat, it bane hard here----"

"I want it hard--Bertha--hard and cold--I'm bad--and it's cool and clean and meek to lay myself on wood--like you, Bertha--you're so meek--why are you so meek, Bertha?"

"I--I do not know."

"Hold me. You're so still. Hold me. I never noticed how deep and still you are. Ah, it's good. Hold me, Bertha."

She began to tremble softly into tears, the hard little rod of her body relaxing.

"I'm no good, Bertha. Why don't I die?'

"You bane very good, Little Mrs."

"He's good. I'm bad. He's so good to me, Bertha, I can't bear it. I can't bear him. His lips. Help me, Bertha."

Bertha, help her. Why, she wanted to. Bertha, who could pull webby stuffs out of drainpipes to the sound of chimes goldily, how she wanted to tell her of those inner secret solaces that rest in the lovely grail of the spirit! Yet all the words that would come were:

"He bane good--open the brown door--"

"Listen! There he comes. Down the hall. Don't let him in, Bertha. I couldn't stand it. Don't. I'll jump out the window first. Don't let him in. Don't let him in."

All the rigidity was back and she clung in a tense hammock, her knees braced up against Bertha, her arms up and locked about her neck. "Save me, Bertha. Save me."

To the convulsive rigidity of the small figure in her arms, Mr. Musliner's voice as gray and as flat as a moor came through the door:

"Erna."

She clung tighter, stifling her sobs against the hurting silence of Bertha.

"Erna. Go back to your room."

Frantic little sob-racked whispers. "Tell him, Bertha--I can't ever--can't, can't ever----"

"She's yoost a little nervous, Mr. Musliner. Maybe if you would please go away for a while--maybe a little later she--will come----"

"Never. Bertha, tell him for me--can't--can't ever--not to be angry--but--can't----"

"She says in yoost a little while, Mr. Musliner--if you will please go away, in a little while I will bring her back."

"No. No. No. I didn't say it, Ben--I can't--can't----"

"Take Mrs. Musliner back to her room, Bertha, and stay with her there--all night. I am going to my room now and inside of ten minutes I shall expect to hear her go into hers--and lock the door."

His footsteps went off into the same thin silence as his coldly thin voice, Mrs. Musliner shuddering down into a state of silence that was more like a faint.

"Come--Mrs. Musliner."

"No. No. No."

"He bane good----"

"I know it, Bertha, but so brown--so terribly, terribly brown----."

To find the words to whisper to her of the little vibratory paths that cut through the brown clay of externals...

"Yoost so the heart is not brown...."

"I know, Bertha, but I can't find my way there. It's so dark--I've tried."

"Come, little Mrs., I'll take you...."

"You can't. Nobody can."

"I can--little Mrs.----"

They sat still, crouched in the gold-powdered darkness, heartbeat to heartbeat. The sobs died down. Tears cooled and chapped little pathways along her cheeks. Bertha spread-kneed in her flannels, and the heavy gray petticoat. Barefoot.

"Oh Bertha--Bertha--so quiet--here with you. Hold me closer."

The Laocoön of them wound arm in arm there on the side of the cot. Colder. Later. Stiller.

"Mrs. Musliner----"

"Let me rest, Bertha, here with you--I feel so still. Stiller than I have ever been."

"It is already the ten minutes----"

"I--can't----"

"Come----"

"How----"

"With me."

She was like someone very quiet with a lovely kind of fatigue. Swoony. No remonstrance to the blanket thrown three cornered across her shoulders and the little journey, half propped against Bertha, through the chilled tile and linoleum of the kitchen.

At Mr. Musliner's door Bertha put up her hand and knocked suddenly.

"Oh God--no--not there--" cried Mrs. Musliner, and reared back.

"This is the way--little Mrs."

"No--no!"

"Yes."

"Oh God," cried Mrs. Musliner again, but suddenly she stood silent and waiting.

After a second Mr. Musliner opened the door. He was in a dressing gown that roped around his waist and his face seemed to look out brownly from behind the white mist of his pallor.

"Ben I--I----"

"She wants to come in, Mr. Musliner----"

"Ben--I--please. You. Me. My dear. Ben--may I open--the door--and come in? May I--Ben?" she said, and stepped with a little rush over the sill.

The door closing on them sent a little sigh of air out over Bertha and left her standing in the river of the narrow hall's darkness.

***

Snow smother, as if the morning had taken a deep breath and could not let go. Almost the odor of Sunday, because not even the milk carts were able to be abroad and, opening the dumb-waiter a spiral of snow flew up like a jack-in-the-box and hit Bertha a good morning.

A white hearse of a day. Ice tesselated.

There were no breakfast rolls on the dumb-waiter and before Julie and Lulu came down to clutter up the silence with talk, she began to mix biscuit, squatting with the bowl caught between her knees, her fingers webbing up with dough.

Presently, early even for him, and cautiously, before the arrival of Lulu and Julie, Mr. Musliner came in. She wanted somehow not to have to look at him, and could feel the ox-blood color of her flush as she bent low over her mixing.

His shoes were brown with tan uppers and she could almost see in them a new firm planting on the ground as he stood there before her.

Pride of the male.

"Bertha." he said, and clearing his throat slid his hand down into his right pocket.

She wanted to help him and his scorching discomfort, but her eyes were glued as if by the dough and would not lift.

"Bertha--I--Mrs. Musliner is very much better this morning."

"Yah--so."

"A little nervousness last night--you understand. Over tired. Bad dreams--quite recovered this morning."

"Yah--yah--so--"

"... closing up the place here and taking a trip to Europe for the change--nervous--needs a rest."

"Yah--yah--so? What?"

"... might be easier if you would leave here immediately--before she has occasion to see you again. You understand--nervous condition--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

"Extra month's wages--references--good girl--but after what has happened, embarrassing for all--you understand--going to Europe anyhow--good girl--go now, before Mrs. Musliner awakens--good girl--extra month's wages--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

***

The day might have been a spark struck off clashing steel, so coldly blue it met Bertha.

Almost immediately her fingers began to ache around the handle of her carpetbag and she could feel the wire-stemmed rose on her hat thridding with still-cold.

It was like being awakened out of a warm dream. For a moment she could not place where she was. What next? Which way? Nothing to suggest traffic. A white nun of a day standing impasse to the march of the city.

An early bird of a boy, a demon with the joy of the storm, flung a snowball at her, missing her so closely that she could taste the whizz.

"Hello, Square-Head! Square-Head!" And then as the thin air passed it along and along after her as she hurried: "Hello, Sq-q-uare Head--Sq-q-quare Head."

The wind had a long whizz to it. Zeouw! It raced around corners, so that it struck her broadsides and jerked her breath away. It rose up under her hat and set it on end like a plate on a juggler's brow. It sent up spiral snow ghosts in front of her and blew flurries of them into her mouth. It caught at her skirts and tore up under, chapping her knees. It tweaked her ears until the lobes were red and swollen and shiny. Zeouw! The Inverness cape went up over her head like an inside out umbrella and her skirts blew forward and the outline of her big legs sprang out. A gilt boot over a cobbler's shop blew down and grazed her by an inch. She was winded and twisted and the carpetbag hooked into burningly cold fingers when she finally staggered into a drug store. There was a pot-bellied stove with an iron fence around it. Her flesh began to sing. She cupped her hands against the warm, sheet-iron fence. All ten of her fingers, little bells ringing. Tears of cold, that the wind had lashed to her cheeks, started to thaw and run down. She began to fumble for her handkerchief with the ten bells of fingers that would not stop ringing.

The chemist, holding a measuring glass to the light and dripping into it a colorless liquid from a large bottle, glanced up and shrugged softly in his seersucker coat.

"Worst blizzard in ten years."

"Yah," she said, with her mouth full of the chattering dice of her teeth.

"Where you going? You won't get a train out of this town to-day. Worst tie-up in ten years."

"No. No. I got to go down to Front Street."

"Front Street? Docks, huh? You have as much chance getting down to Front Street as a duck has of swimming through snowdrifts."

"I got to go," she said.

He looked at her over his glasses. He had a Yankee face with a kick-up of beard.

"Where are you going, back to the old country?"

"Back? I've never been."

"Aint's you a Finn or something? You look as foreign to me as a samovar. Got some foreign streaks in you, I'll wager."

"Many--but I don't know--all mixed--."

"Melting pot--eh? Well, it's a bad morning to have going anywhere on your mind. Worst in ten years."

"I'm yoost changing places."

"Oh--housework?"

"Cook mostly."

"Whose firing a good, hefty girl like you on such a morning?"

"Not fired. I got references."

"Say, I have a customer over on Fifty-eighth Street needs a cook--worst way! Small family. Good wages. I'm putting up these aromatic spirits now for the old woman. You might take it over for me and size up the place. Want the address--good folks?"

"If you will please be so good--."

He ran his tongue over a label, smacking it on to the bottle. "No slip-ups on the way over. I'm taking a chance on you. My delivery boy wouldn't miss the chance of staying away for a snowstorm like this if he lived upstairs. Here's the name and address--."

She took the slip with her thick numbed fingers.

"Wall-en-stein--."

"Just around the corner. Tell them I sent you. He's the owner of the Sample Shoe Store on Thirty-fourth Street."

She felt it incumbent upon her to purchase something, her eyes roving along the shiny convex surface of a glass case. Rows of scented toilet soaps shaped like the bodies of birds and made to cut softly into the water. Perfumes. Bottle after bottle, the fragrance throttled down with white membranous hoods. Sponges with gaping thirsty little mouths. Things. Things that were sweet to the flesh. Bertha had never owned of them.

"I'll have that," she said and pointed down into the case. It did not matter.

"You don't want to buy anything," he said, and reached in for a cake of the soap, slipping it into her hand. "I don't want you to take something just to be polite. Have that on me. You're a nice girl. They'll be lucky to get you. Wish I could afford you for the wife. Don't forget the package."

She picked up her bag.

"Want to leave it here--in case--"

"Oh no," she said, "I don't mind," and curving her sore fingers again about the handle, went out.

The wind met her with a swoop and a yell, standing her hat again up on end. She bent into it, baring her teeth with the effort. The elliptical shaped bar of soap was in her palm. It had pleasant dimension. The smooth little blob of soap, shaped as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

***

The Wallensteins, where Bertha was to remain several years, lived on the fifth floor. There were two middle-aged men in uniform in the lower foyer, and pressed leatherette walls with grape-and-leaf design embossed into them. What was really a small black onyx fountain in the center of the lower hall was kept filled with artificial daisies, and odds and ends belonging to the elevator men were surreptitiously tucked under the cotton moss.

The Wallenstein living room overlooked the heads of the buildings opposite and took in a fleeting view of Central Park with an etching of tree, a pagoda on a rock, and a round of lake with a swan boat floating upon it. A showy room of the shiny, overstuffed leather furniture of the period. Velour hangings with tassels. A handsome baby grand piano and a lamp with an openwork brass shade. Paintings in shadow boxes and, incongruously enough, to fill in the narrow panel of wall between the mantelpiece and door, a few Japanese prints which Mr. Wallenstein had once been obliged to take over as part payment of a bad account. Cool and thin with the fine calligraphy of a minute and apparently emotionless art. Bare-legged coolies full of little running steps. The span of many bridges. A plum tree, botanically wrong. A peacock, ornithologically wrong. Slant faces hung on like masks. Bertha liked to dust their impassiveness.

Evenings when there was not a poker party around the dining-room table, the Wallensteins lounged about this room in loose unexcited attitudes. Mr. Wallenstein reading the paper and yawning enormously with protracted shudderings as he turned the pages. He was a tall, heavy-set fellow, with very black hair parted down the center and set on to his head squarely, like a toupee. His small, straight mustache with the ends waxed up enhanced this squareness. When he stretched out in his long hypothenuse and hoisted the newspaper, he littered the entire center of the room, and to pass him, one had to climb.

Mrs. Wallenstein, on these evenings when there was no poker game, uncorseted herself immediately after dinner, the soft white flesh running down the hill of her body. She was very blonde, and wore her hair in an elaborate tier upon tier of puffs. These puffs, made in rows of three, four, and five, like hot buns, cluttered the house. So much as open a drawer and one crawled out at you and wound itself around your fingers in a webby, highly unpleasant fashion. Once Mr. Wallenstein slid into a row of them that had somehow dropped into his shoe, and forthwith had the noisy horrors.

Whenever old Mrs. Wallenstein found one, she picked it up gingerly, as if it were a mouse by the tail, and handed it in a scathing kind of silence to her daughter-in-law.

"Pfui!" was how she felt about most things pertaining to her son's wife. But she sat, too, in the living room with the pair of them after dinner. There was an arch of shadow where the lamplight did not reach. Old Mrs. Wallenstein liked to sit back in that, idle and brooding and with dry old eyes like prunes.

She had to have a hassock, because her feet did not touch the floor. Young Mrs. Wallenstein had a way of kicking the hassock savagely when her mother-in-law was not about, gritting her teeth with pain at her stubbed toes and taking a fierce kind of delight in that pain, and then kicking it again and again with her fancy tipped shoes.

Young Mrs. Wallenstein's shoes were eloquent. They were short-vamped, florid, and after even one wearing apt to tipple a little of run-over heels. Bertha was constantly at them with polish and cleaning fluids and vaseline for the patent leather. There was one pair of very high-heeled, slightly lop-sided champagne-colored ones with black jigsaw trimming. Mrs. Wallenstein never failed with her "pfui" when she passed them, smelling of cleaning fluid and drying crookedly on the window sill. There was something suggestive of blondely loose fat about their short vamps and run-over heels.

Old Mrs. Wallenstein wore square-toed, black bluchers with rubber insets, which she polished herself every morning and set on the fire escape outside Bertha's window to dry.

Her son, who was inclined to bunions, wore square toes too, but with the additional flourish of spats with the green or ruby of vivid hose above them.

Underneath the dining room table, their respective feet spoke volumes. The polished orthodox ones of old Mrs. Wallenstein on their hassock. The short-vamp, champagne ones. Wallenstein's rather stolid ones between the two.

Difficult, nervous meals of three kinds of silences. An old lady's aching one. A young woman's high-tensioned one. Wallenstein's tired one.

Sometimes it seemed to Bertha that the dining room of golden oak and swell of elaborate sideboard was filled with a gale of this silence, like one of those terrific arctic windstorms that old sea dogs dread because the water, in horrible phenomena, lies like glass under the gale too wind-beaten to lift a wave.

"Pass me the butter, Wally." Scarcely the phraseology to rock empires, and yet, when May Wallenstein said it, old Mrs. Wallenstein, whose skin was sapless at best, could seem to shrivel into the ancient parchment of the Torah.

She kept kosher. Valiantly. The forbidden combination of meat and butter might desecrate her daughter-in-law's board, but not the spirit nor the palate of the old lady. At her end of the table the sacred rituals of the "_fleischig_" and "_milchig_" remained unviolated. There was a shelf in the kitchen, especially contrived by her son, for the kosher utensils and a two-burner gas-stove in the corner for the personal and private preparation of her orthodox foods.

May hated that stove and the little whisper of garlic that hung above it.

"Makes me sick to my stummick to walk into my own kitchen" was her frequent _sotto voce_. "I'm Episcopalian, but I'd like to see myself frying myself Episcopalian pork chops. Good to their stummicks! Oh, Lord! Kosher is another word for stummick-love."

And Bertha, hearing, would clatter pans and turn on the spigot for the plunge of water into the sink, because sometimes the undertones percolated to the old woman's dim ears and then she had one of her smothering spells and spirits of ammonia had to be administered. On one occasion, Mr. Wallenstein, in the midst of a Monday marked-down sale of Oxford-ties had to be sent for, and all through the rush hours was obliged to sit alternating between holding his mother's hand in her darkened bedroom and pacifying his wife, who invariably expressed her frenzy by throwing articles of clothing into a traveling bag and then strewing them all out again. It kept Bertha on the jump, what with the hot water bag for the old lady's numb feet and picking up the young one's distracted articles of finery.

"No. I won't be the one to go. Why should I? That's just what she's laying for, to break up this house. But she won't! Not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks!"

The last was a favorite aphorism of Mrs. Wallenstein. You could hear it from the poker table:

"I'll raise you two bones. You can't bluff me. Not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks." Or over the telephone to her sister, who clerked in the Sample Shoe Store: "Tell Wally his mother is fixing him one of his sweet-sour messes for his supper and to stop by and bring me home a couple of chops for mine. I wouldn't eat anything sweet and sour for no man. No siree, not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks!"

A gay painted phrase like the little pagoda all lantern-hung in one of the Japanese prints. Bertha liked it. Button up the back with tiddlywinks! To be sure, May didn't button up that way at all, but with much holding in at the waist and reddening of the face, and exclamations like "Ouch, watch out, let me straighten my shields first. A little elbow grease will help."

The fastenings were usually blobby velvet ones or hooks that strained at their moorings.

To button up the back with tiddlywinks was to be gay as a striped tent. It made Bertha feel gay somehow, just to repeat it to herself; as gay as the day the river ran ahead of the furniture van to show them the way to the grove.

But, generally, there was little enough to feel gay about at the Wallensteins, with May and her tantrums so quick on the trigger, or the broody old woman who on Friday evenings would light the candles in her room and keep open her door so that the sound of her weeping came in little bleatings down the hallway.

"She's putting on, putting on," May would sing-song, as she lolled _en déshabillé_ in the living room. She had a perpetually hoarse voice, full of fog. "When I feel like having a good cry, I go in my room and shut the door, and God knows there's enough reasons around here for having a good cry. Evening's diversion. God, how they love to cry. It's a wonder there's not an Atlantic Ocean somewheres made up of noisy kosher tears."

"I wish you'd leave my mother out of your gab, May."

"Oh, you do, do you? Well then, I wish she'd leave her gab out of my business!"

"Between you and your rows you two women are driving me plumb raving crazy. At least if I was the youngest I'd give in to an old woman--like my mother with only a few years left to live. I'd humor her, May. Honest I would."

"Few years. Long enough to have ruined my home for years! Few years! With her digestion for the greasy meals she eats, she stands a good chance of ruining it for many years to come."

"I won't stand hearing my mother talked about in language that's only fit for a bar-room. This isn't the Bowery. It's supposed to be a home where a man who's been on his feet all day can get a minute's peace."

"What about me? Am I entitled to a little peace in my own home, too? That old woman is driving me crazy. I can't get no friends to come to the house no more the way she sits out in the next room yammering to herself--I won't turn kosher for nobody's old woman. You married me for what I was and my Episcopalian hide is as precious to me as her kosher one! This isn't a home. It's a hell-house."

"May, you can't change a leopard's spots. My mother's old, and she's grieving herself to death over things you're too young to understand. She likes you, May."